


Bye Bye, Baby Blue

by EchoShimmer



Series: Wumptober 2020 [13]
Category: Batman - All Media Types, Red Robin (Comics)
Genre: (But It's A Bit Late For That), Character Death, Dead Tim Drake, Emotional Hurt, Gen, Grief/Mourning, References to kidnapping, Reflection, Tim Drake Needs a Hug, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-19
Updated: 2020-10-19
Packaged: 2021-03-09 04:33:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,316
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27108799
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EchoShimmer/pseuds/EchoShimmer
Summary: Its easy to see your mistakes after it's too late.
Relationships: Tim Drake & Bruce Wayne, Tim Drake & Damian Wayne, Tim Drake & Dick Grayson, Tim Drake & Jason Todd
Series: Wumptober 2020 [13]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1948924
Comments: 2
Kudos: 197





	Bye Bye, Baby Blue

**Author's Note:**

> This one was written at the request of [nighttmr](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nighttmr/pseuds/nighttmr)! There will be a companion piece for this one posted on the 31st :)
> 
> \---  
> Title from "The Other Side of Paradise" by Glass Animals

Dick had never realized how far he had let Tim slip, after the whole Thing where Bruce had been assumed dead and Dick had given the Robin title to Damian. 

In retrospect, he was man enough to realize that he had handled that situation very, very badly. He should have talked to Tim before giving away the title, rather than let him find out by seeing Damian in the suit. He should have listened to Tim’s reasoning when he claimed Bruce was alive rather than just assuming his little brother was lost in grief. He should have worked harder to track Tim down when he left, to make sure the then barely-seventeen-year-old was alright, and offered help then when it was clear that he wouldn’t be dissuaded from his mission.

Dick  _ knew _ about Tim’s childhood, his issues with abandonment. He should have known how every action he took would have been perceived by the other boy. But Dick had been blind to what effect his choices were having, and when Tim had come back to Gotham after his time doing who-knows-what abroad, after they had worked together to outsmart Ra’s al-Ghul and Bruce had come home, Dick had just assumed that everything would finally settle back to the way it was before.

That had been the beginning of his second series of mistakes.

Months had gone by. Dick lived in the Manor again with Bruce and Damian, with Jason and Tim occasionally dropping by for a visit. He had been able to relax in a way he hadn’t ever since Bruce’s disappearance, he got to spend more time with his newest little brother, got to readjust to being Nightwing again. 

Tim had developed his own life at this point, with his own apartment and a full-time job at WE and his own list of cases to tackle himself. He was so  _ good _ at what he did, taking down powerful enemies solo and with ease, becoming almost like a second Oracle with his skill in intelligence gathering and detective work. In some cases, even members of the Justice League started to prefer him to Batman.

It never dawned on Dick that maybe all of this could be too much for Tim to handle alone. He always seemed to be organized and competent at what he did, never missing a deadline when he committed to it, and almost never turning anyone down who asked for help. Every time Dick went to him for help on a case, he was received with a smile and agreement. The times the two brothers teamed up were some of the quickest and easiest solved cases in Nightwing’s history.

Looking back now, Dick was keenly aware that those cases were the only real source of interaction the two of them had one on one ever since Bruce’s return. He couldn’t remember the last time they saw each other for a reason not related to vigilante work. Picturing Tim now from those rare team-ups and really comparing Red Robin Tim to the boy he had been less than a year prior, it should have been clear that something had been off. He was too withdrawn, too tired, pulled too thin.

Dick should have never let himself become so content with the way things were. He should have never assumed that Tim was handling everything alright, that he would take his own health and well being into account like he should. Dick had treated Tim like an adult, forgetting that he was really just a kid who had been raised too independent and had a tendency to take on too much.

He really wished that he had reached out to make sure, now.

\---

Jason hadn’t realized how close he had grown to his Replacement.

When he had first come back, even after the Pit madness had started to fade for real, Tim had been a source of annoyance and irritation. He was the little Bruce clone who had managed to wiggle his way into the Robin suit after Jason’s death, the good little soldier who obeyed orders and never killed anyone. The rich kid who fit in with the world of High Society in their public persona’s in a way that Jason never had. 

He had been Bruce’s perfect sidekick, perfect son. It made Jason want to punch him.

Things had changed, when Bruce had disappeared. Jason hadn’t been in a good place at the time, he didn’t get all the details of what went down. But he realized, at some point, that Tim wasn’t in Gotham anymore, but Robin still was. Tim had eventually come back, wearing a new suit, setting up his own place away from the Manor, taking on the job of keeping WE afloat. It had taken until Bruce’s grand return for Jason to figure out what bothered him so much about the situation.

Tim had been officially cut loose from the rest of the family, orbiting them loosely in a way reminiscent of Jason himself. That realization, that Tim, the supposed perfect child, had somehow ended up an outsider among the Bats, had been a striking one. It had Jason truly reassessing what he knew about his Replacement, that prickling thread of curiosity driving him to reach out the next time one of his cases could use an extra set of eyes and legs. He hadn’t expected anything to come from it, he had been surprised that Tim had even agreed to help at all. But then a couple weeks later, Red had reached out to Hood with a similar request on one of his cases.

Things had snowballed from there. Within a couple of team ups, Timbo had quickly made his way up the rankings for Jason’s favorite Wayne. Unlike Jason had been led to believe, Red was actually surprisingly uncaring about Hood’s method for dealing with criminals. He was fine as long as no one died when they teamed up, and Jason found that Tim could actually be quite a violent fighter himself when properly motivated. He was brilliant, seeming almost superhuman at times in that regard, and yet he was very hesitant to display this and attract attention. 

He had a bad tendency to overwork, pulling all-nighter after all-nighter and trying his best to live off of caffeine and spite to the point that sometimes when Jason showed up for a team-up he instead ended up dragging his overexerted Replacement back to one of their apartments for a proper meal and a decent night's sleep. 

It got to the point that he genuinely worried about the kid during the day. He had so little self-preservation skills, he was too quick to set out and try to get through everything on his own. Despite how often they worked and hung out together, Tim’s automatic first response always seemed to be handling his issue on his own, no matter whether or not he realistically should. There were way too many times where he just showed up at Jason’s place injured in the middle of the night.

The kid should really have not been cut loose and left to his own devices the way that he had been, even Jason could see that. He was too…  _ young _ . Jason had been about one more ‘close call’ away from demanding the kid officially let him move in, let them be full time partners on the night job. At least then he could keep a better eye on the little idiot genius.

Jason should have just made the call sooner. He had seen the warning signs. Now it was too late.

\---

Bruce had never claimed to be a perfect father. Far from it, really. He tried his best, that was sure, but with each of his children there had been so many mistakes made. They were all so different, had such different needs in a parent. Their lives were so entangled with the capes that everything became all the more complicated for it. There was a narrow line between trusted partner and beloved family that they had to straddle, being ever cautious to not stray too far one way or the other. Either outcome could be disastrous.

He hadn’t realized his mistakes with Tim until it was far too late. Bruce hadn’t wanted Tim at first, not as a partner and certainly not as a son, not after Jason. But Bruce had  _ needed  _ Tim there to hold him back. It had taken him way too long to acknowledge how deeply he had grown to care for the boy, and it was even longer before they had become family legally speaking.

Bruce should have realized that their early interactions would have set a strong precedent, that Tim’s childhood would have affected how their interactions were perceived. Tim’s mind, at some point, had tied his worth as a family member to how useful he was to them rather than knowing that he was loved unconditionally. Some part of Bruce had made the realization after Tim’s official adoption. He had started working more to prove this fact to his son, to teach him that he had worth beyond how he helped them. He liked to think that he had been getting somewhere.

But then Bruce had been sucked into the timestream, and when Tim had pulled him out everything had changed. Damian was Robin now, Tim having struck out on his own on his quest to save his assumed-dead father. He had taken control at WE, and had been doing such an excellent enough job at it that Bruce saw no reason as to interfere with that development.

Tim had become his own person in Bruce’s absence. He was finding himself. Remembering how Dick and Jason had reacted when Bruce tried to question their independence too much, Bruce had somewhat reluctantly stepped back, letting Tim grow on his own. Bruce was proud of how far his second-youngest had come without his help, and he resigned himself to standing on the sidelines until Tim reached a point where he needed to ask for help. 

The requests never came.

Bruce should have realized that Tim’s life, Tim’s needs, were so much different than his older brothers. He had already known how to be independent and rely on only himself. What Tim had needed to learn was that it was  _ okay _ to reach out, that it was a parent’s job to take care of their child. Tim didn’t know that he could rely on Bruce, that he didn’t need to be ‘perfect’ and ‘independent’ just to be tolerated. Bruce should have  _ known _ that that was how Tim would perceive their sudden distance ever since Bruce’s return.

Tim had seemed to be handling everything with aplomb, and Bruce had just… let him pull away. Tim was a capable young man, he would be fine.

Bruce wished more than anything that he had just held on tighter. Then maybe none of this would have ever happened. 

Maybe he wouldn’t have lost another son.

\---

Damian had never realized how much of the family was held together by Drake.

When Damian had first arrived at the Manor, Drake had been nothing more than a rival as son and Batman’s partner. When Grayson had given Damian the mantle, he had just taken that as further proof of his superiority over his predecessor. The fact that Drake had managed to strike off on his own and prove that Father wasn’t dead had forced a grudging acknowledgement that the older boy wasn’t as useless as Damian had first presumed. When Drake hadn’t tried to move back in with the family after, Damian had again taken it as a sign that his thinking was correct. Damian was the superior Robin.

Damian had refused to fully recognize how much the rest of the family respected Drake. His mental prowess couldn’t mean all  _ that  _ much compared to physical strength. Damian watched jealously as Father turned to Drake when stuck on a case, but at the end of the day it was Damian who stood by the Bat’s side on patrols. Drake’s influence was nothing compared to that.

Such thoughts had been a grave miscalculation. 

Now Drake was gone, apparently captured by Crane when he had gone into a fight alone and ill-prepared. It had taken too many hours before anyone realized he was missing, multiple days before they had managed to wrangle a location from the throats of unwilling henchmen. 

Hood had been particularly vicious, but even Batman had pushed harder for answers then Damian had expected. No one else had been surprised at their father’s intensity.

They had still been too late, in the end. Drake was dead, leaving behind the physical weight of grief in his wake. The Manor was heavy with his ghostly presence despite the fact that he hadn’t set foot there himself for weeks before the tragedy. It was stifling.

Todd retreated from the family in rage like he hadn’t in months, and no one had the energy to try and stop him. Grayson was unnaturally quiet and still in a way that Damian found unsettling. Father threw himself into work both as Batman and at Wayne Enterprises, spending hours pouring over the work Drake left behind as if that could help the guilt. Pennyworth hovered over each of his charges, unsure how to help any of them but needing the challenge as a distraction.

Damian’s assumption that he had somehow “beat” Drake had been mistaken. Drake, despite having been seemingly distanced from the family, had not been intentionally pushed away in favor of Damian. They had both served a different role as sons and partners, and now there was a void that Damian was unable to fill. No one could.

Damian had been wrong. He recognized that now. If only he had been given the chance to tell Drake that. Maybe things could have been different. 

It was far, far too late now.

**Author's Note:**

> Alright, so. The next fic I wrote is technically for tomorrow's prompt, but in the name of not having an awkward time gap between posts right at the end I'm going to space things out a bit. So, expect the next post on the 22nd!
> 
> Edit 10/31/2020: Prequel/companion piece can be found [here](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27310078)!


End file.
